Science

[SpeedyWorm1]

Well I was in Science a couple days ago [my best class] and my teacher has this lecture about how all mass creates gravity. If you ejected a dead body into space [theoretically] it COULD [in a couple of eons] create its own planet! I have tried to figure out WHY all mass creates its own gravity, but I have yet to find out. If anyone can tell me it would be most appreciated.

[singo]

No one knows how mass has gravity. A particle called the "graviton" is predicted, but hasnt been found yet despite physicists using really big particle accellerators smashing things into other things...

[GenocideAlive]

If you ejected a dead body into space [theoretically] it COULD [in a couple of eons] create its own planet!
Given the odds of probability, it would more than likely become part of another mass forming a planet. Bodies such as ... bodies have generally negligible gravitational pull. And a better topic would be "Gravity".

[GrimTerror]

Yeah i hear physisists (forget me trying to spell that) like to start smashing things together in the name of science. I think the're just trying to create a new weapon though.

Gravity has always astounded me, but the argument of Telekinesis has astounded me more...Maybe there's a link. Manipulating forces like gravity and time to produce various effects...

[GenocideAlive]

Yeah i hear physisists (forget me trying to spell that) like to start smashing things together in the name of science. I think the're just trying to create a new weapon though.
Please tell me this is sarcasm. Please.

[Yoda]

Everything has their own gravitational field - the larger the object the larger the force of gravity acting upon it. Thats why some stars become black holes and others become white dwarfs.

[singo]

Yeah i hear physisists (forget me trying to spell that) like to start smashing things together in the name of science. I think the're just trying to create a new weapon though.


Nah, smashing things is just fun. And is actually useful. Especially with regards to the insides of atoms and whatnot.

Plus particle accellerators would be a crap weapon, the one is I think, a synchrotron with circumference 27km. Not exactly mobile.

[Wehrmacht]

I know this is gonna spark up something but....
even though the Partical accellerators are big. (one such accellerator is 1/2 in Switz 1/2 in France)
they can produce astounding results.
For instance ANTI-MATTER. If you read Dan Brown's books(Da Vinci Code, Angel's and Demons) ANTI-MATTER is considered the ultimate energy source and a most terrifying weapon.
ONE GRAM of the stuff could power New York for a Month.
ONE GRAM could also level ten city blocks.
ANTI-MATTER is something almost impossible to make because for it to exist it cannot come in contact with anything that has matter..... basically meaning EVERYTHING but the Vaccuum or space.
even if it comes in contact with the air it assimulates the matter in a very big explosion....
Great Energy Source, also a great weapon. so they can be used to create weapons :P
But to answer your question Speedy, its not necessarly the WHY, its the HOW that always matters...
Things cannot always be explained they can only be demonstrated for further use and understanding...

[GrassDragon]

http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Forum/latexrender/pictures/76560cf7f0a9ccdd631213a1e6e9e47f.gif

Was using LaTeX and thought it'd be cool :P

No idea what's with gravity though, just know it works.

[Whiteknight]

We know a planet's gravity because of it's mass.
We know a planet's mass because of it's gravity.

I like it. :)

Also, Wehr, Dan Brown books are almost completely BS. Some points are interesting but most of it is misleading or totally wrong.

[TinyDancer]

I know this is gonna spark up something but....
even though the Partical accellerators are big. (one such accellerator is 1/2 in Switz 1/2 in France)
they can produce astounding results.
For instance ANTI-MATTER. If you read Dan Brown's books(Da Vinci Code, Angel's and Demons) ANTI-MATTER is considered the ultimate energy source and a most terrifying weapon.
ONE GRAM of the stuff could power New York for a Month.
ONE GRAM could also level ten city blocks.
ANTI-MATTER is something almost impossible to make because for it to exist it cannot come in contact with anything that has matter..... basically meaning EVERYTHING but the Vaccuum or space.
even if it comes in contact with the air it assimulates the matter in a very big explosion....
Great Energy Source, also a great weapon. so they can be used to create weapons :P
But to answer your question Speedy, its not necessarly the WHY, its the HOW that always matters...
Things cannot always be explained they can only be demonstrated for further use and understanding...

Antimatter is scary stuff..after reading Angels and Demons I did a bunch of research on it..just like I went to go look at Da Vinci's paintings after reading the Da Vinci Code.

Like GrassDragon..I have no idea why it does what it does, it just does.

[Fenguin]

http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Forum/latexrender/pictures/76560cf7f0a9ccdd631213a1e6e9e47f.gif

Was using LaTeX and thought it'd be cool :P

No idea what's with gravity though, just know it works.
Yay LaTeX. It's all in the \cdot's though, not asterisks. :D

Edit: Antimatter is quite cool but sadly creating it uses much more energy than it gives. We've only been able to create a few antiprotons at CERN (around 10,000 I think) but they're continually perfecting their methods and thus we might see increases in production soon.

Edit 2: If you think of space-time as a 2-dimensional fabric (this is simplifying things greatly here but it'll help us understand it more), then masses would cause dents in the fabric. Big masses would cause big dents, little masses would cause little dents, and singularities will cause a huge dent with a hole in the middle. Then, when an object goes close to the mass, it will start to slide inwards because of the slope of the dent (it'll actually follow a curved path due to its initial velocity) and it might just fall into the center of the dent and join the mass that's already there, adding to said mass and making its dent bigger.

[Wehrmacht]

prove it to me that they are wrong with real hard facts and i will completely belive u

[Whiteknight]

prove it to me that they are wrong with real hard facts and i will completely belive u

To give you a sense of how enormously wrong the book was, another has been written just to explain all of it. (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1586170341/103-0381166-6907849?v=glance)

Here are some examples:

http://www.dannyscl.net/2005/01/dan-brown-is-fraud-list-of-errors-in.html
http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/facts/fm0035.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/callahan/callahan130.html
http://www.aboutbibleprophecy.com/davinci.htm

[loads_of_fun]

I know this is gonna spark up something but....
even though the Partical accellerators are big. (one such accellerator is 1/2 in Switz 1/2 in France)
they can produce astounding results.
For instance ANTI-MATTER. If you read Dan Brown's books(Da Vinci Code, Angel's and Demons) ANTI-MATTER is considered the ultimate energy source and a most terrifying weapon.
ONE GRAM of the stuff could power New York for a Month.
ONE GRAM could also level ten city blocks.
ANTI-MATTER is something almost impossible to make because for it to exist it cannot come in contact with anything that has matter..... basically meaning EVERYTHING but the Vaccuum or space.
even if it comes in contact with the air it assimulates the matter in a very big explosion....
Great Energy Source, also a great weapon. so they can be used to create weapons :P
But to answer your question Speedy, its not necessarly the WHY, its the HOW that always matters...
Things cannot always be explained they can only be demonstrated for further use and understanding...
anit-matter is also EXTERMALY
expensive it would cost 100 times
the USA national sallerie to power
a light bulb

note: the national sallerie is more
than 1 trillion dollars so at more
than 100 trillion dollars its not really
gonna become a threat(weapon wise)
any time soon or maby not ever unless
a way is found to produce it much
cheaper


Edit:spelling

[Darmago]

When I last checked-a year or two ago- CERN had only made enough anti-matter to power a light bulb for about three seconds.

Though I'm guessing a lot of the energy of the annihilation would be wasted in the conversion to electricity.

CERN has made some anti-hydrogens... the first person to make an anti-proton was Owen Chamberlain.

As for Dan Brown's books... If he had meant them to be taken as true he would have filed them under non fiction. Now he's just basking in the wealth that the idiotic population is almost giving to him.

[singo]

Yes, it is quite depressing that people seem unable to tell the difference between reality and fiction. On the other hand the books themselves are quite good I thought.

Now, anti-matter. when it annihilates it creates a rather large amount of energy. Unfortunately, you can't power much at all with two 0.9 MeV photons (I think that is the value anyway) and it cant be made more than a few protons at a time. Not the most efficient way of doing things is it?

[Kaervek]

The thought that all matter produced it's own gravitational pull originated with Sir Isaac Newton and his famed work in the Principia Mathematica.


Every object in the Universe attracts every other object with a force directed along the line of centers of mass for the two objects. This force is proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the separation between the centers of mass of the two objects.


Put simply, all things are attracted to one another by a force called gravity (much like magnetism). However, an object of great mass produces a proportianally greater amount of gravity than that of an object of little mass. For instance, a bowling ball's gravity is greater than that of a marble. Why? Simply because the bowling ball's mass allows for a greater sum of gravitational force. Having said that, the gravitational force emitted by one object has a lesser effect on another object when distance between the two is increased.


Gravity is proportional to the mass of each object, but has an inverse square relationship with the distance between the centres of each mass.

As you can see, by this theory, gravitation's effects are exponentially weakened with each incremental step that it is distanced from another object. The gravitational force remains constant, though it's effect upon the other object become staggeringly weaker the farther away they become from eachother. This can be witnessed by the gradual weakening of Earth's gravitational pull on astronauts as they steadily speed away from the planet.

Back to my bowling ball vs. marble analogy: a common question is "then why doesn't the marble roll towards a bowling ball when both are placed upon a flat surface?" I'm not sure of the answer to that, but I recall reading about it sometime in the recent past. My guess would be that ultimately it would depend on the marble and the bowling ball's overall gravitational pull against eachother in relation to that of the earth's gravitational pull on them both.

Now, when Einstein came into the picture, he revolutionized the entire theory of gravity with his theory of general relativity. Einstein also theorized that gravity, while not necessarily being an instantaneous and constant force, was in fact an energy (much like sound or light) that was directly affected by it
s distance and time of travel. Now, at first this sounds quite similar to Newton's idea that gravity "has an inverse square relationship with the distance between the centres of each mass," and while this may be true, the context in which the two theories are presented play an astronomical role. Newton's theory almost required for the force of gravity to be essentially weaker at it's "extremeties" or at it's furthest reaches. This simply isn't the case - gravity doesn't extend from itself, but (according to Einstein) is rather "sent" and "received," much like sound waves and light.

In fact, the speed of gravity (assuming it's in fact "sent" and "received," and not an "extention of itself") was recently tested in 2002 by two astrophysicists named Ed Fomalont and Sergei Kopeikin. Einstein's theory was the the speed of gravity should be consistent with the speed of light, and the Fomalon-Kopeikin experiment appears to have concluded this prediction to be true, though having not been peer-reviewed (and subsequently not confirmed or accepted by the scientific community), these results are open to skepticism. Some argue that the only thing that was observed was the speed of light in a convoluted manner.


Related links:

Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity).
JupiterScientific.org (http://jupiterscientific.org/sciinfo/sog.html)

[william_clinch]

Back to my bowling ball vs. marble analogy: a common question is "then why doesn't the marble roll towards a bowling ball when both are placed upon a flat surface?" I'm not sure of the answer to that,
There is an atraction between them, but it is increadably weak compared to the friction between the spheres and the ground, and they would also move very very slowly
The universe has four different forces holding it together, gravity being by far the weakest (10^36 times) weaker than ekectromagnetic force, which is the force that holds atoms together, and is involved with friction and such
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_force
everything has mass, even light (but it doesn't have much mass, which is why it is 'light' :P:P:P)
It's verry difficult to explain how gravity works, because there isn't realy anything that it can be compared with, all I can say is it's a fundamental part of the fabric of the universe